This week’s Marketoon takes a hard look at the veracity of claims made by our modern day pitch-people, the influencers.
Fishburne’s take: “Influencer marketing is a large and growing part of this widespread pursuit by brands to appear more authentic. This makes the fakery that is endemic to so much of influencer marketing even more striking. A study by HypeAuditor found that 55% of Instagram influencers were involved in some sort of social media fraud and fakery in 2020 and that 45% of Instagram accounts are not even real people. Yet they predict the Instagram influencer market will grow by 15% this year.”
Why we care: Performance-based relationships with influencers, and a fraud solution to insure that measurement is accurate, help marketers determine the value of an influencer campaign. Broader questions of authenticity should be directed to the influencer’s audience, which ideally is also your brand’s audience. Understanding why an influencer is successful in engaging this audience will help marketers communicate more effectively to customers.